[steiney]

Hi All,

I'm wondering if anyone has had experience with the following scenario and how it worked:

I have a Macbook Pro. I have been using a few different video game emulators such as Snes9x. There is limited availability, though, of emulators for Mac, especially when it comes to PS2, etc. whereas there are many more for Windows.

My thought is to run a Windows emulator, either Parallels or VMWare Fusion, and then run whichever video game emulator inside the Windows emulation. It seems like it would work, but I'm curious to see if anyone has tried this or if anyone thinks this would work/not work.

I'm open to suggestions, comments, questions, etc.

Thanks,

steiney

 

[Spyhop]

I know you can run many opengl and d3d games through vmware fusion or parallels with 3d acceleration. Obviously, you're going to need enough ram to accomodate the overhead. Not really sure if emus will work the same way tbh.

 

[Ahielia]

So, you want to run an emulator inside an emulator?
Good luck with that

I see no problem with it, but that's just me I guess.
If your hardware is good enough, it shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Spyhop]

So, you want to run an emulator inside an emulator?

A virtual machine is not an emulator.

 

[Squall-Leonhart]

a Virtual Machine IS an emulator.

A virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (i.e. a computer) that executes programs like a physical machine.

The Dictionary Definition of Emulate (Emulator, Emulation) Defines its status as an emulator.

 

[Spyhop]

Sigh. I knew some nickpicky fool was gonna have to chip in his 2 cents and completely sidetrack the issue.

It's not an emulator in the way he's describing, and VMs emulate a machine, not windows. Windows is running natively, and should be capable of doing what he wants, provided he has the resources to do so and there's no weird emu issue (with the game emu I mean)

 

[Mad]

You can ran some old console emus inside a VM.
But dont expect to run anything after DC on it.

Your better guess would find linux emus from those consoles, and try to compile them on Mac OS.

 

[aceloop]

Just dual boot in to M$ Windows, or if they is something like Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator (i put this here just in case some people/person think Wine is an Emulator)) for mac, unlike a VM which is an Emulator.

 

[VT-Vincent]

You may want to look at VMware Fusion 3 when it comes out, they are making huge strides in supporting Direct3D and OpenGL and version 3 is supposed to be one of the best implementations yet. For the most part though, I would recommend dual booting Windows with boot camp as your primary option. Running a VM requires a lot of overhead and as such, it will never perform to the level of an OS running directly on the hardware.

 

[Lex_Light]

Even if WINE says that "Wine Is Not an Emulator", it's an emulator.

 

[xZabuzax]

Running an emulator inside an emulator?, i was experimenting with that and i managed to run the dos version of zsnes inside dosbox 0.73, i tried f-zero and to my surprise dosbox runned dos-zsnes at 30 fps, with nearly perfect audio and it was quite playable.

Of course i tried dosbox with more emulators (gbc, nes, snes) but zsnes was the one with better results. I'm surprised that dosbox could run a playable snes emulator inside it on my old pc.

Athlon 3200+
GeForce 6100
Win XP Professional
2gb Ram